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Hackathon teams get two days to tackle Toronto traffic

That was the premise of TrafficJam, a hackathon that took place at Evergreen Brick Works from October 2 to 4.

Twenty-two teams competed for a $5,000 prize, as well as a chance to show off projects to the City of Toronto, and local technology firms.

The projects were all themed around Toronto’s traffic troubles. Before the start, the teams were asked to think about certain questions, like what the primary causes of congestion are, and how the city can measure if its policy changes are effective.

The answers to those questions were allowed to take the form of either a solution, like an app that warns of road closures on your daily commute, or as an insight, like a map showing Toronto’s least-walkable areas.

The event is the brainchild of Stephen Buckley, general manager of transportation services at the City of Toronto. Jesse Darling, the project lead for the hackathon, said Buckley approached Evergreen CityWorks on ideas for better managing Toronto’s traffic.

“It’s one of the biggest problems in Toronto,” Darling said.

The 22 teams started on Friday afternoon, and had until Sunday at 3 p.m. to finish. Some opted to go home at night, but others slept on site in order to get more work done.

“I just thought it was standard. I came into this thinking it was going to be this huge slumber party,” Amanda Chou, one of the only people on her team to stay overnight, said.

Chou was part of the team that won first place, for a project that looked at the reliability of different commutes.

“Reliability is the difference (between) your trip is 50 minutes long plus or minus 10 minutes, or your trip is 50 minutes long plus or minus 35 minutes,” Michelle Berquist, another member of the winning team said. The team was also able to find what areas suffered from less reliability.

The win came as a bit of a surprise to the team, as they produced an insight, which are often less sexy than the slick apps that are often created during hackathons.

“It’s nice to see an idea like this recognized, because it is a little more complex . . . that kind of stuff that’s not really sexy,” Berquist said.

Though the wins were a nice acknowledgment of the weekend’s work, Buckley said many teams will see their ideas rewarded in the coming weeks when they’re approached by the city or different companies.

“We saw a lot of diamonds in the rough, and even teams that didn’t win, there will be a lot of them that we’ll be reaching out to,” he said.

Many of the teams feel the same way. Jonathan Dursi, another member of the winning team, said the possibilities of where the team’s idea could go only became obvious towards the end of the hackathon.

“Earlier this afternoon we realized that actually now we’re more excited about where this could lead than we were 48 hours ago,” he said.

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The project: an analysis of the reliability of Toronto’s commutes. Some areas have much lower reliability, meaning the time it takes to travel can vary from one day to the next.

“This could form a baseline against which you could run models on how the street is going to react to different things. It’s the kind of thing that could feed into tools like Google Trip (Planner), so in addition to an estimate, this kind of information would let you get that plus or minus whatever.” — Team member Michelle Berquist

Second Place: Rue View

The project: an app that predicts traffic on a user’s commute, and can tell them when traffic is at its lowest — or highest — to help them plan their trip.

“The whole idea is, for tomorrow, for the next day, for the whole week, can we predict at what time traffic is bad, at what time traffic is good? Can we show people when rush hour is, can we show people when rush hour ends, so they can make informed decisions about when to drive?” — Team member Askan Parcham Kashani

Third Place: Three Comma Club

The project: a map that shows the city’s most walkable streets, using data from sources like Instagram and the City’s open data portal.

“This is more of a decision-making tool for the city to plan where they would improve public spaces to encourage walkability. Based on that insight, there’s an app version . . . that allows users to see the routes that they have the option to take, and the calories associated with them, the walk score, and different destinations along the way that are interesting. ” — Team member Gurbani Paintal

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